Bickering remains a constant.

What was a bit different in some ways was that I was then very much the newbie writing on the Baron Zemo's Lair Board. Zemo was moderator, an original poster from the AMB days, and the established archvillain of the shared universe. He even led his own team of secondary poster and non-poster villains, the Scourge of the BZL. Moo was also an occasional poster and that poster was real-Lisa's actual real-sister (who then had a real lab-tech named Davidowicz working for her); Lisa was probably the most influential poster in the community.

So early on I tried very hard not to "overstep" other posters' turf and their characters' shadows. I was at once both deferential (in ways I am now to arrogant or burned out to be) and overconfident (making gross changes and additions to other poster-characters' situations that I would not consider today). I do recall checking by correspondence with Lisa before I got her and the Hood together, though.

Skip the next couple of paragraphs if you don't want "heavy".

After a while there was a big upheaval in the commuinity when poster-Zemo published a horrible story featuring his character brutally beating and disfiguring Dancer - vicious, nasty, mysogonistic stuff quite different from anything that had come before, that was as much a personal attack on the poster as the character. Lisa led the backlash againt it. I know Sarah, a real-life domestic abuse victim, was in tears about it. Within three hours of it being posted it had been deleted by demand (I still have a copy of record) and good riddance. Within four hours, poster-Zemo had deleted the whole board.

New provision was made for a different site, and at poster-Zemo's request it was called something different. It became the Tales of the Parodyverse board. I interpreted poster-Zemo's comments as including a whish not to have his character used any more and subsequently quietly established Baron Zemo as now dead in PV continuity.

That change of venue was a watershed for the community and for our stories. For quite a while I was the only active poster whose primary character was a villain. By then a fair proportion of PV supporting cast and baddies were characters I had created of whose posters had expressed conditions for their use that I understood. So I had less to worry about in spreading grandiose schemes that brushed against other cast. Future villains' meetings were rarely attended by many poster-characters and required different writing considerations







No, they're vital. He said so. He's protecting them.







There's a lot of progress in hardware and software, but comic-book universes including the Parodyverse are still scientifically ahead of our own world in many fields including robotics and computing.

Why, though? I'm assuming that the Parodyverse operates under certain modified conditions, including some physical laws that allow weird sciences to work. Additional metals like vibratium allow different kinds of engineering. Additional mathematical and logic principles allow better "thinking engines". Different universal cosntants allow dimensional travel and faster-than-light movement. Different biological principles enable superpowers. Even cause and effect are altered, making it possible for a well-trained human to avoid a spray of bullets more often than not.

What our present storyline explores is what happens of those exceptions are stripped away, leaving science and physics no different to our world.




I think the most critical difference between the PV and our world in robotic and A.I. is that "Turing test" gap that nobody here has yet found a way to bridge. Therefore the PV conditions evidently favour that discovery since it has aleady been made there.




It's about whether any kind of electronically-supported consciounsess is possible in a revised set of physical conditions; the narrative will tell, but the general threat facing the cast is: "if it doesn't currently happen in our real-world it won't happen there before long."




We'll be picking up on Chiaki in about three chapter's time.